Visual - Force Control and Structured Light Fusion to Improve Recognition of Discontinuities in Surfaces

This paper describes a method to detect changes in given surfaces tracked by the robot end-effector. To do so, first an approach to combine visual and force information is described. By filtering the interaction forces, a parameter which provides the probability of a change in the tracking surface is obtained. In order to obtain a more accurate determination of the change in the surface, information from a laser located at the robot end-effector is also employed. Therefore, a robust method for detecting surface discontinuities which employs force and visual information jointly with structured light is presented